Starting a Sustainable Community

"Starting an Intentional Community" workshop on Sat. Oct 15, 10-4 (with a potluck lunch break), in Laramie, specific location TBA. This class is a sliding scale of $15-25. However, if you have been coming to our Laramie Ecovillage meetings, this fee is waived. Please let Ma’ikwe’ know if you are coming so I know how many handouts to make and if we need to find a bigger space than our living room.

Cooperation is a key element of sustainability, and a sense of community is critical for our well-being as humans. Many people feel drawn to a particular version of community: the residential intentional community. This workshop draws on years of knowledge from community founders, and Ma’ikwe’s own 18 years of cooperative living, including three start-up communities, to lay out the most important considerations for making a new community a success.

Blending practical advice with opportunities for self-reflection, this workshop can help you set your feet on the right path for your group to thrive.

Topics will include:

creating a good vision statementwhat successful founders have in commonthe relationship between decision-making, conflict resolution and membership process15 spectrums that help define what kind of a community you are creatingsocial dynamics you need to know abouteconomic choices and their implication for sustainability and group cohesionwhat you should— and shouldn’t— freak out aboutkey questions for making your community a sustainable one

Maikwe Ludwig is the Executive Director of the Center for Sustainable and Cooperative Culture at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. She has lived in sustainability-oriented intentional communities for almost 2 decades, and serves of the Board of Directors of the Fellowship for Intentional Community. She spent much of 2015 on a national speaking tour, talking about Dancing Rabbit, cooperative culture and climate change. She is also a consensus and facilitation trainer, and works with groups to improve their group dynamics and understanding of the cooperative culture transition. Her latest project is a progressive policy development initiative focused on economic and ecological justice, called Materialized Empathy. Ma'ikwe is the author of Passion as Big as a Planet: Evolving Eco-activism in America and is a regular contributor to Communities magazine.

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